GE Healthcare to acquire Orbotech's nuclear medicine technology

2 Nov 2010

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GE Healthcare is to acquire Israeli company Orbotech Medical
Solutions Ltd (OMS) a manufacturer of solid state gamma radiation
detectors made of cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) for medical imaging.

The detectors are used in GE Healthcare’s Alcyone nuclear medicine
technology.

GE Healthcare will pay OMS's parent company Orbotech US$9 million in
cash and up to an additional US$5 million in cash, depending on
performance. The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and
is expected to be closed in the first quarter of 2011. The takeover
also ends GE's litigation against Orbotech in which it claimed for
damages related to the supply of CZT modules in Israel.

“We believe the future of nuclear medicine lies in the further
development of CZT used in our Alcyone technology,” said Nathan
Hermony, general manager Nuclear Medicine for GE Healthcare.
“Through this acquisition, we will expand our investment in CZT
technology to benefit our molecular imaging customers, bringing new
nuclear medicine technologies to healthcare professionals
worldwide.”

Available in SPECT (Discovery NM 530c) and SPECT/CT (Discovery
NM/CT 570c) configurations, Alcyone technology enables views of
cardiac anatomy and functionality with greater clarity and speed,
resulting in scan times as short as three minutes or up to a
four-fold reduction in dose. Alcyone technology helps clinicians
provide patients with faster and more comfortable examinations and
improve clinician confidence. Furthermore, unlike conventional
nuclear imaging, with Alcyone’s focused pinhole collimation, all
views are acquired simultaneously during a fully stationary SPECT
acquisition, eliminating equipment movement during the scan and
reducing the risk of motion artifacts.

Hermony added, “Alcyone technology opens the doors for
developments of new applications such as dynamic acquisition for
measuring blood flow and multiple isotopes to improve specificity of
the nuclear cardiology examination.”

Commenting on the transaction, Rani Cohen, President and Chief
Executive Officer of Orbotech, said, “We believe that a company such
as GE will now be very well placed to pursue, and bring to
successful commercialization, the cutting edge CZT technology
developed by OMS for use in nuclear medicine imaging applications.”